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Blockchain is in that space where we still have to explain it, because most of the peo­ple have gone from not hav­ing it around to hav­ing it around. But for kind of the folks that are your age or a lit­tle younger it’s kind of always been there, at which point it doesn’t real­ly need to be explained. It does how­ev­er need to be con­tex­tu­al­ized.

I think in order to under­stand why the Pirate Party came about as a polit­i­cal par­ty, you have to look at the way that these file sharers—often minors—were being addressed by the polit­i­cal estab­lish­ment and by the cul­tur­al lob­by­ists in par­tic­u­lar. And what kinds of mea­sures were being lob­bied for by the cul­tur­al indus­tries, espe­cial­ly the sur­veil­lance of people’s online behav­ior, which we’ve only learned prob­a­bly years lat­er was going to become a much broad­er prob­lem for a fun­da­men­tal rights.

Everybody thinks of bureau­crats as being kind of a neu­tral force. But I’m going to make the case that bureau­crats are in fact a very strong­ly neg­a­tive force, and that automat­ing the bureau­crat­ic func­tions inside of our soci­ety is nec­es­sary for fur­ther human progress.

We want to sort of bring you all up to speed on some of the things that we’ve been think­ing about, some of the con­ver­sa­tions we’ve been hav­ing that I’ve had to edit out of the tail ends of episodes, link a few con­cepts and also be… Well, first because we think it’s real­ly impor­tant to be sort of trans­par­ent about where we’re going with the series and the con­ver­sa­tions we’re hav­ing.

This is why it mat­ters whether algo­rithms can be ago­nist, giv­en their roles in gov­er­nance. When the log­ic of algo­rithms is under­stood as auto­crat­ic, we’re going to feel pow­er­less and pan­icked because we can’t pos­si­bly inter­vene. If we assume that they’re delib­er­ate­ly demo­c­ra­t­ic, we’ll assume an Internet of equal agents, ratio­nal debate, and emerg­ing con­sen­sus posi­tions, which prob­a­bly doesn’t sound like the Internet that many of us actu­al­ly rec­og­nize.